Impact of Change Approvals on other addons along with its limitations

After months of development, ChangeApproval 1.0.1 was released yesterday, although it's still being actively developed. This article explains the impact of Change Approval on some addons as well as its limitations.

What are Change Approvals (CHA) ?

Those who are using Content Approvals will quickly become familiar with Change Approvals. CHA is similar to Content Approvals but CHA is for settings changes, while Content Approvals is for content changes.

With the features of CHA, all changes regarding access rights, language, expiration data and archiving, and hierarchy structure (moving pages/blocks to a new location in the hierarchy) must be reviewed and approved before being applied for the IT system. The review process is the same as that of Content Approval. CHA also uses the same sequence definition with Content Approvals. Therefore, users don't have to manage two definitions for two type of changes, which will reduce the complexity. 

This article introduces CHA. For more details, visit CHA's User Guide.

Limitation

• In the first release, Change Approvals only supports CMS 10.x. The version for CMS 11 will be available soon.
• Only supports user interface notification (through the bell). 
• It’s unable to list all items waiting to be reviewed or items that were already reviewed in the task editor.
• The notification icon for Change Approvals is not supported yet, so it might take a while for users to recognize the CHA notification type.

Impact on other addons

Language Manager (LM)

LM has some impact on ChangeApproval, since an editor wants to add/disable a language of a page using LM.

1. 1. If the page does not inherit settings from parent

• The page has no change approval associated with it. After the editor adds/disables a language, changes are captured for the review process and the flow works well as described above. Admins cannot change languages using the language dialog.
• If an admin has changed languages of the page before using language dialog before, the editor can still use LM to add/disable languages, and changes can still be captured for the review process. However, change details now follow setting made by LM, not by language dialog.

1. 2. if the page inherits settings from its parent

• For version < 3.0.4, LM cannot work as expected for this case. It is recommended that two addons should not be used in parallel for this case.
• For 3.0.4, LM works well and it should the same as (1).

Optimization Block - OP

• If the site installing OP is set up under IIS \ Virtual Directory, ChangeApproval cannot be installed if the site is using an OP version lower than 2.3.2. Version 2.3.2 was published for compatability with CHA. Mostly, nothing special has been changed for this version. Otherwise, the site and OP should work well with CHA.

More features will be added to the next release of ChangeApprovals.